3 Sep
2006
3 Sep
'06
3:52 p.m.
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I used to think it might be worthwhile to somehow work
out a plug-in (for the
cartridge port?) that would work with a standard floppy interface, though
you'd also need power for the drive as the standard c64 drive wouldn't be
able to handle it. Besides the actual interface you'd probably need an eprom
or similar.
You could do something similar to the "IDEfile" interface - build a box that
emulates a 1541 and put a menu system on it. The big problem would be with
copy-protected software that used half-track scanning, code upload and other
nasty tricks.
What LSI controller? They have a 6502 on there, a
couple of ROMs, and in
some cases a gate array chip that just replaces a bunch of LSTTL and makes it
cheaper for them to manufacture
Oh, it was a gate array? I knew it was some custom chip, I just wasn't sure if
it was a custom LSI or a gate array... It certainly has a Commodore house part
number on it IIRC.
(and I have some of those on hand if anybody
needs some :-). Aside from that there's an NE592 preamp chip, and the rest
is a couple of 6522 chips and a handful of LSTTL for the interface and clock
generation and whatnot.
You could probably stuff that lot into an FPGA, but I don't know if anyone's
done a cycle-accurate 6522 HDL model yet. There's certainly free 6502 models
out there though - Free6502 (which used to be on Free-IP) and the like.
I really should try and do that once I've got some spare cash lying around.
Could really do with getting a C-64 and a known-good 1541 first though...
--
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